Passage Through the Present
Half-Way House. By Edmund Blunden.
Becoming. By Eden Phillput ts. (Beam. 6s.) Warr the history of twentieth-century poetry comes to be written it will be amusing for those alive at the time (if anyone is) to compare the surviving names of the first quarter of the century with the names of those who occupied most space in the anthologies of. the period. The com- parison will be instructive, not merely in the usual manner as showing the vagaries of literary taste and the inevitable shortsightedness of contemporary judgements, but for another reason. It will demonstrate, better perhaps than ever before, how a " movement " (Georgian poetry, as Mr. Leavis remarks, can scarcely be considered as anything else) can exist and develop apart from, or almost apart from, the production of serious poetry ; serious, that is, in the sense that it demands to be judged by the highest standards. One remembers the Romantic Movement of course, and the con- temporary popularity of Southey, Moore, Campbell, Rogers and others. But the popularity of these writers existed quite independently beside the growing'reputations of those poets from whom the movement chiefly derived its strength, and with whom it is now identified. Between 1910 and 1920, the heyday of Georgian poetry, there were no Wordsworths or Shelley's in -the field. Nevertheless a movement grew and flourished, flourished to such an extent that it seemed to embrace not merely the few serious poets who were writing at the time, but swept in also hundreds of the mediocre and many who were not poets at all. And it was the latter, most strange of all, who gave the movement its distinctive character. It was not so much that writers like Mr. Freeman, Mr. Shanks, Mr. Squire or Mr. Drinkwater, to mention only four of many, somehow managed to attach themselves and become part of the movement, but that the corporate influence which these and a dozen others exerted was apparently strong enough to claim for them, without undue absurdity, a place beside poets like Mr. Yeats, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and, at a different level, Mr. Blunden and Mr. de la Mare.
These reflections are prompted by Mr. Blunden's latest book of verse, Half-Way House. Mr. Blundell occupies the almost unique position of being both a typical and, in ROME sense, a serious Georgian poet. He is typical, perhaps accidentally, by virtue of his interest in the country and in pastoral themes, and also since he displays to some extent that quality of poetic anaemia, that lack of emotional robustness, which is the true Georgian's most revealing characteristic. Yet he is entitled to be called serious if only on account of his integrity– the fact that he clearly writes poetry from impulse and not from a desire to write poetry—and, within limits, for his equipment as a poet. Having said which, one has perhaps sufficiently indicated the scope of Half-Way House. The first poem in the book, A Summer's Fanny, is both the longest and the best, and exemplifies well the strength and also the weakness of Mr. Blunden's talent. The simple story of a boyhood friendship, the love idyll of one of its protagonists with Nell, interrupted by the War but brought finally to a happy ending, is the matter of the poem, which Mr. Blunden tells us was started some ten years ago and taken up again recently. It provides him, as one would expect, with many opportunities for passages descriptive of country life and scene, and these have the quiet assurance, the sensitive observation and " rich rusticity " which we have come to expect from him. But the opportunities for poetry of a more compelling order, poetry which the pressure of deep feeling has reduced to a
fine element, are rare ; and one is more than ever doubtful if, had they come, Mr. Blunden would have been capable of sustaining them. Too often one is conscious that he is writing in an outworn tradition, a tradition which had live roots in the time of Spenser and Keats, and even as late as Matthew Arnold, but which to-day needs a fresh growth, a new direction, if it is to escape archaism and the perils of pastiche. In particular, lines like : " I to my camp and he to his diverged " in which the interference is more than usually apparent, border on the comic because of the abruptness with which they reveal the gap between the world in which Mr. Blunden's poetry is valid and the world of reality in which our emotions can be' directly stirred. With those realities Mr. Blunden, even in the shorter poems in which he is more immediately concerned with them, still seems a little uncomfortable and a little at a loss for the power of words.
Mr. Gibson, as another accredited Georgian, invites com- parison with the author of Half-Way House, but the compari- son will not take one far. Mr. Gibson is at once so much more typical a Georgian and so much less serious a poet that little which has been said of Mr. Blunden may usefully be applied to him. One might even say that his typicality, to use a convenient generalization, is his most striking quality. Certainly if one were asked for an illustration of Georgianism it would be hard to find a more revealing example than the following, entitled Moonstruck . . . :
" The moon has got into his blood And runs, quicksilver, through his veins ; And so he rambles all night long About the fields and lanes : And when he comes upon a pond Wherein her image glitters bright, He kicks his heels up in the air, And dances with delight.
He dances till the moon herself And the mock moon are dancing, too-- Quicksilver in his toes and heels, He dances in the dew."
Here we have the whole range of Georgian artifice—the rhythmic simplicity, the slight air of whimsicality, the apparent delicacy of feeling—employed in complete despite of the fact that the piece has no poetic meaning, no emotional point d'appui, is in fact about nothing at all. Too many Of Mr. Gibson's poems betray the same lack of impulse, of any genuine emotion at their source. Unlike Mr. Blunden one suspects him of writing poetry not because he feels compelled to, but because it has become a habit with him. One pictures him almost, like Alice in the railway carriage, accompanied by a gnat-like inner voice which encourages him, at the slightest opportunity, with a whispered " you might make a poem about that." And Mr. Gibson obediently does so. The results, inevitably, are seldom more than pleasant metrical frames for an incidental idea. Indeed Mr. Gibson is, par excellence, the poet of slight moods and occasional pieces. Where these are mainly descriptive, as in the section of Islands entitled Adventure, they have the integrity of their subjects and a certain freshness of obser- vation ; but where he attempts something more poetically ambitious, as in Traffic, Mr. Gibson exhibits a banality which is distressing when it is not simply flat.
Mr. Phillpotts is better known as the dramatist of The Farmer's Wife than as a poet, and Becoming makes the reason for this clear. For Mr. Phillpotts, though he can write verse which rhymes, scans, and indeed fulfils all the outward conditions of poetry, is not a poet. Unfortunately in poetry, as in love, ability is not enough. To be a poet one must be able to feel as a poet, and this Mr. Phillpotts, in common with ninety-nine per cent. of the rest of creation, ua.nnot do. Accordingly his poems, for all their passionate 'defence of Reason or their charming country scenes, -fail to ,make the heart beat a stroke faster. Far from moving one " as with a trumpet ", they fail. even to move one with the echo of a penny whistle. Perhaps this is not wholly Mr. Phillpotts' fault. He is yet another example of the fact Oat accomplishment in one art is no guarantee of excellence An another.
M. rAmONS, •
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